What's the bottleneck?

[Pyrates]

Hi all

I played the open beta recently, and I've been having a bit of performance troubles. I set everything as low as possible, kept the resolution at 1900x1200, which is native for my monitor, but still sometimes the frames went below 10/s, which is kind of a slow motion (of course, in particular when playing with 4 people, which is what I'll be wanting to do once D3 is released). I don't know much about hardware, so I'd like to write down my system spec and ask you if there's one a bottleneck there. If anyone could recommend an upgrade path for D3, that would be quite awesome as well (I'm on a pretty low budget, though).

So here's the system:

• Athlon 64 X2 4600+ (2.4 Ghz)
• 4GB Ram
• Nvidia Geforce gtx 260, 896mb mem
• abit kn9 mainboard (I think the chipset is nforce 4)
• Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit (SP1)
• 2 hitachi sata hard drives (not sure how to get more details)

The windows performance rating (not sure how reliable that is, though) is 5.2 for cpu & ram, 5.7 for the hard disk(s) and 7.1 for graphics. I'd surely supply any more details I might have missed.

So my guess of course is that I'd need a new cpu, mainboard and ram... but only from that windows index, so maybe someone more knowledgeable can confirm or has a better idea, or even a viable upgrade path. Any pointers appreciated

[aerial]

cpu is pretty weak in that setup, you could try to overclock it

also I'd wait for final release, because there are some issues with beta optimization, full version might run much smoother

[Pyrates]

Hmm I might try overclocking, I'll check it out. Do you think it might be a good idea to get a better athlon 64 x2 like the 6000+ at ebay or so and keep the mb? I'm looking for a cheap way to upgrade, but I don't know how much I gain by this.

[Felix]

The 6000+ would be like a solid overclock of the cpu you already got. It will make it on par just about, with an early core 2 duo like the E6700. Which you could probably play Diablo III on, without too much bottlenecking the GPU.

The problem is, that the 6000+ isn't cheap these days, it's more like getting a rare cpu that isn't manufactored anymore. If you find one it will cost you topdollar.

So on Amazon, such a chip is a 180$, compare that to a brandnew AMD Quadcore cpu like the AMD FX-4100 which is on Newegg for 109$. Different combodeals will give you this cpu and a mb, at about the price of the 6000+.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...t=Combo.882879

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...t=Combo.876619

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...t=Combo.875087

Then you only need to buy 4gb of Ram, which is cheap.

It would be reasonable, to decide to upgrade the whole system. cpu, mb and ram.

Edit; the devil in the detail is the OS, I don't know if you will have to buy a new Win 7, or if you can use your old copy.

[Eagle]

but still sometimes the frames went below 10/s, which is kind of a slow motion (of course, in particular when playing with 4 people, which is what I'll be wanting to do once D3 is released).

Was this slow down particularily bad when a lot of destruction was going on? Specifically when there was a lot of environmental destruction and the associated physics going on? If yes then it's most probably bottlenecking on CPU performance and you CPU is near the minimum requirements. One place it always happened badly for me was the spikes on the stairs that the Templar destroys by Jondar.

However, I don't know how slow the game should run on a minimum requirement CPU so I can't say if it's your CPUs speed making it as bad as it is for you or if you have some other problem. Some people have/had the above mentioned problem with high end cpus. I have an i5 750 and an HD 4890 and I had terrible slow downs to <10fps in 4 player games (well it was worse in multiplayer games, still noticeable solo).

For some people turning the audio channels down to 32 or even 16 fixes it. For me it was caused by my CPU auto-throttling because it was over heating. If you want to check your temps while D3 is running you can download HWMonitor (or something like it) and leave it running in the background, then just alt-tab and check the temps after you've been playing for a few minutes.


Also, like aerial says, the release version will be more optimised than the Beta.